lasterka

jean echenoz. meettok

Zatopek. Just as happens with Fitipaldi, we can’t put a face to the name but we immediately know what it means. Emil Zatopek was an athlete who started running and never stopped. He wasn’t Forrest Gump. The people up in Hollywood would sell their mothers if they could make a film that contained a bare ounce of the strength, deepness, simplicity and beauty that Zatopek displayed as he raced. Though Lasterka is fiction, there is nothing new on show here. It’s not a biography but by the end we feel we know Emil Zatopek better than ever. Publishers Meettok have also translated and published Jean Echenoz’s Ravel and Tximista. All we can say is thank you.

cronicas de jerusalem

guy delisle.astiberri

Journalist and comic book artist Joe Sacco masterfully portrayed what was happening between Palestine and Israel in his graphic novel Palestina. Delisle in his Cronicas de Jerusalem uses the same style he used in previous work (Shenzhen, Pyongyang, Burma Chronicles) and tells the story from his own everyday experience viewpoint. What he tells us is never epic but the smallest detail informs us of the injustice, violence, crude surrealism and massacres that occur in the “Holy Land”.

mu

borja iglesias. bidehuts

Borja Iglesias sets his narrative in the everyday routine of a music-lover. The main character in the story brings physical and psychological spaces together while he makes dinner, rehearsals, in the tour van and at the hotel. The story tells us the story of what happens when nothing happens. There is no painful drama on show
here, no clear-cut comedy. Generalisations are never fair but Mu brings us the story of a generation that seems to be stuck in its adolescence per secula seculorum, and it shows us the hidden profound load on the faces of people who never say mu (anything) when they say mu (something).

hausnart

aldizkaria.lapiko kritikoa

Hausnart is the magazine of Lapiko kritikoa collective. And, truth be told, they certainly do tend to reflect on quite a lot of stuff. And they can certainly provoke a debate when the mood takes them. They have undoubtedly made friends along the way, but they have also crossed swords with quite a few too. That tends to be the case when one speaks openly and clearly. They really have set the cat among the pigeons as far as the Basque intelligentsia is concerned, especially amongst those who lock themselves away in their towers of spineless guff. We would certainly like to draw attention to Galfarsoro’s piece on multi-culturism and the concept of nation, both for what
he says and the way he says it. Anglo-Saxon ideas in favour of Basque National construction. Work that brain my friend!